I'm in the beautiful little town of Arles, France, where everything is beautiful except for the god damn French keyboards and my hotel, ironically named 'Le Premiere Classe'. I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth! But where I sleep is of no real consequence.
The streets are tiny, the shutters painted lavendar against the stucco-ish bolond of the buildings, and you can almost see the cafes as Van Gogh saw them when he was here painting his little heart out.
Yesterday I took a 'safari' into the Camargue which is essentially a big swampland or delta toard the end of the Rhone river. There are these very stocky but beautiful white horses that exist only there (and they are brown or gray until they are six when they go all white with blondish manes...i will try to upload some photos but i haven't been having the best of luck with the speed of the computers in italy and france), and bulls ( no cows somehow) and flamingos. Our driver whose name I wish I could remember was hilarious and had just returned from Iran. He goes every year. He said he used to also go to Montana every year in the US, but since 9/11 he's been hassled too much at customs to ever come back.
Anyway, it started with us leaving on time but being chased by a woman down the street. So he stops. And pulls a U-ey and in pile six more people. Now, it's important to understand that the jeep holds 9 people comfortably and that there were already 7 of us in there. And off we go while they argue amibly in French. It becomes clear after a few minutes that they thought we were the other company that runs the same kind of trip from the same location at the same time. When we pull over on the highway to wait for the right company to show up the driver comes back to talk specifically to me. He says 'we wait for the right truck. Maybe it will come, maybe not. This is France, you know. And the south. Relax, or take a taxi, that's how it is here.' He is befreinding me. The rest of the trip he speaks in English for my benefit and then rapidly translates in French to the two French women who don't know English. He tells us all kinds of funny stories like those of the baby bulls. 'Here,' he says as we are stopped outside a small circular structure, 'they test baby cow. I say baby cow because they are not really bull. So, if baby cow is mean, they sell him for lot of money. He will run. If baby cow is nice...' and here he takes his flat hand across his throat to indicate that they'll kill him. 'He's meat. You understand what I say?' In other words, the mean ones go to the eqauivalent of the rodeo, which I will atten tonight.
Every Wednesday night in the Amphitheatre built, I think, in the first Century AD, they have a 'bull run' where men taunt the bulls, who each have a thing tied between their horns, and then the bulls chase them. The men are trying to get the thing tied between the horns, the bulls are trying to kill the men. All good fun. I actually can't wait!
Okay, as this keyboard is killing me, I will leave you with a final story about my trip to Arles. Rather unpleasant all around. So, I took the overnight train from Rome and got a couchette (sleeper car). Seemed like a good idea but wasn't (except thqt I can now say I've had a couchette on an overnight train...there may be circles in which this is romanticised or otherwise cool). It was very loud and just as I had fallen asleep we stopped and picked up more passengers, some of whom could not get into their couchettes and simply yelled and knocked on the door for a good half an hour before thinking of finding a train attendant who could let them in. Wide awake now!
And the train, somewhere along the way got super late, meaning I missed my connecting train in Nice. But these are trains and there's another just a half hour after I arrive...only it's running 50 minutes late. So now it's 11:30 in the morning and I've had very limited sleep, hardly anything to eat and am stuffed on a platform full of cranky people awaiting their train to Nice. Finally it comes and I am amazed to find a seat, by a window no less! All seems well again. Until the next stop where a man who must have slept in an ashtray for the four nights previous and did not speak a word of English and who was slurring so badly I couldn't tell if he was speaking French or Italien sat down next to me. And began touching me evcery chance he could. 'Non!' I kept saying, pushing him off of me. He kept trying to converse with me even though we could not understand each other at all, and I was clearly not interested in the conversation...I did make out that he wanted to join me at my hotel.
Literally, two hours of this man breathing on me, grabbing me, trying to hold my hand. I feigned sleep which was the only thing I could do to get him to stop. There was nowhere else for me to go as the train was chock full with people standing. At the end of the trip (I still had another hour journey to take) he asked me if I wanted to have coffee with him. I actually yelled at him to back off. I'm not sure he understood my words, but he definitely got my meaning. I have since been shopping for a simple band to wear on my left hand ring finger.
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